Microsoft has unveiled a suite of products and tools designed to expand its Dynamic IT vision.

Bob Kelly, corporate vice president for servers and tools at Microsoft, laid out the company's latest products at the TechEd IT Forum 2007 in Barcelona.

The applications are aimed at helping enterprises to manage their physical and virtual IT systems.

Among the announcements was Microsoft's Hyper-V server virtualisation technology within Windows Server 2008, previously codenamed Veridian, and Hyper-V Server, a standalone hypervisor-based server virtualisation product.

Kelly explained that virtualisation technology is moving beyond servers and expanding into application, desktop and presentation virtualisation.

"Earlier this year we introduced our vision for Dynamic IT which aims to make IT a stronger partner to the business by bringing together the capabilities of core infrastructure, application and development platforms," he said.

"At TechEd IT Forum we are demonstrating how that vision is coming to life for customers as IT is streamlined across the full spectrum of our software and technology offerings.

"This includes exciting new developments with Windows Server, Microsoft System Centre, SQL Server and the Desktop Optimisation Pack.

"The response from customers has been strong as we move towards the worldwide February 2008 launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008."

Kelly added that Microsoft will unveil new products on 27 February next year providing the "most secure, most reliable software stack Microsoft has ever delivered".

These are Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, with Visual Studio available to developers by the end of the year.

Windows Server 2008 will ship before the end of the first quarter of 2008 and SQL Server 2008 by the end of the second half of 2008.